Romancing the Reader

If you write a book what you would like is for the reader to fallen hopelessly in love with your characters and their adventures. Ideally they should be smitten the moment they read the title or catch a glimpse of the book cover.

As a reader, this has probably happened to you at some point. The thing you’re looking for and the thing you find intersect in a wonderful manner and you feel like the universe is tilting in your direction. Hurray!

However, forcing someone to fall in love at first sight is as impossible with books as it is in real life. It happens when it happens and, unless you’re a master hypnotist with no scruples, beyond the control of mere mortals.

But a love affair doesn’t always require an aligning of the stars and planets. Sometimes people take a little time to come around, sometimes they rush in and regret it later. And our relationships with books are no different.

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Writers Write, Right?

Generally speaking, starting writing isn’t the problem. If you’re up for it then getting words on the page isn’t that hard. At first.

Enthusiasm, motivation, belief in your ideas — these things tend to be in abundant supply at the beginning.

Two weeks later, though, things may have changed. It’s all very well sitting down with the right intentions, but what do you do when all that drive you had goes missing?

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Starting With Subplot

 

There are stories where you start in the middle of things and keep going. In the case of thrillers and books that are part of a series the reader doesn’t really need an explanation of what’s going on, they’ll work it out on the fly.

In most cases, though, readers prefer to get an idea of characters and setting before things really take off. The inciting incident that propels the main character into adventure may not occur for several chapters.

When you’re trying to establish the world so the reader has an idea of who they’re going to be following for the next few hundred pages the approach is often to show ordinary life, important relationships, interests and activities. And this can be quite dull.

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Complications Of Storytelling

All stories get more complicated the further you get into them.

This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just inevitable. The reader starts off knowing nothing, and over the course of the story they get fed more and more information.

If it’s a properly written story anything the reader is told will be relevant to further developments. That means they have to remember everything that’s happened so far and how it relates to everything else that’s also happened and everything that’s going to happen.

This network of events, consequences and reactions will get ever more intricate. To the point where it can become so overwhelming that when a character says, “Hey, Mary’s back!” all the reader thinks is, Who the hell is Mary?  

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Synopsis Support Pt 2

A synopsis for a novel comes in two different forms.

The first is a very dry, play-by play outline of what happens without any frills or attempts to impress the reader.

The other is more of a selling document intended to get the reader to read the full manuscript.

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Zen And The Craft Of Writing

When I first started writing fiction I read a lot of books about how to write. How to write attention grabbing stories. How to engage emotionally with the reader. How to keep the story moving forward. The inciting incident. The danger of excessive adverbs. Why you should show instead of tell.

I’ve read widely enough to have a fairly well developed sense of taste. I know when something’s really good. I know when something’s bad. I know when it isn’t quite working. 

The difficult part though is knowing what needs to change, and how to change it.

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Writer's Waning Willpower

No matter how dedicated and determined you are to be a writer and produce the next great novel, there will be times when you don’t feel like sitting in front of your computer and tapping at the keyboard.

You know it’s the right thing to do, and once you get into it you’ll probably not want to stop, but you just can’t be bothered.

What people don’t realise though is that how you feel mentally is a biological process. You may think you’re angry because Bill at work was an ass, but the actual anger in your body is created by chemicals and hormones and various things floating about in your blood (I should point out that I am not a doctor, but I have seen nearly three episodes of Gray’s Anatomy, so I know what I’m talking about).

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Story Spectrum

We can all agree that there are two kinds of books: good books and bad books.

What we might not be able to agree is which ones are which. 

There are obviously a broad array of genres and sub-genres. And there are also people with varying tastes and preferences.

But surely we can agree on some basic requirements for a good book. A truth, so to speak, universally acknowledged.

Let’s start with the most basic of basics. The writer has to be able to write to a decent standard, right?

Weeeell, not exactly. 

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Motivation For Writers

As a writer you need someone to be honest to your face (even if it’s just your online face). You may feel you can take criticism as long as it’s constructive or sensitively worded or if it comes from someone you respect, but trying to influence how a reader reacts to your work is never going to yield good results.

Constructive doesn’t mean polite or supportive, it means something you can build on. That’s not to say you can’t be those things when putting forward critical opinions, but if you’re asking for constructive criticism, be aware of what it is you’re asking for.

Having said that, it also helps greatly to have someone to encourage you. 

Wait, didn’t I just suggest that helpful feedback didn’t require a cheerleading section? Yes, I did. But there’s more to writing than getting the words in the right order and nicely polished.

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Knowing What To Do Next

In life, sometimes you come to a point when dealing with a problem where you don’t know what to do next. Either there’s no obvious solution, or it’s in somebody else’s hands and you have to wait.

In fiction, characters can face this same issue. Leads can dry up, tests have to be waited for, procedures followed.

However, in fiction, taking a break from the story isn’t really a viable option. Waiting six to eight weeks for the blood tests to come back from the lab isn’t going to be very interesting if you approach it realistically.

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The Perfectly Balanced Story

When you tell someone a story in person, you probably know the person you’re talking to. You will at least have a rough idea of how familiar they are with the people and places you’re referring to. And if you misjudge, they can always ask you questions.

In fiction, it’s much harder to know exactly how much information a reader needs or wants. And even if you did, it would be impossible to provide since you’ll have more than one reader, and each will have different requirements.

You can’t get the balance right, because there is no way to please everyone.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get it wrong. You may not be able to please all the people all the time, but you can certainly piss them all off.

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Starting A Story In The Middle

Starting a story in the middle of action is fine if that’s the kind of story you’re telling. Generally, that'd probably be something in the adventure/thriller genre. But not all stories suit the kind of opening where assassins are chasing a monkey over the rooftops of Buenos Aires (although I have no doubt that book would be a huge hit).

And even if you are writing in that genre, you might prefer to build up to those kind of scenes. Having someone hanging from a twelfth storey window ledge can feel very hackneyed. We don’t know the character, we don’t know why he’s up there, and frankly, we don’t care. It’s not always enough to just put some random person in peril.

A high tempo opening scene might not be right for your story and it quite often reads like an attempt by the writer to inject the story with drama it hasn’t really earned and can feel contrived.

But an energetic set-piece out of an action movie isn’t the only way to make the reader feel they’re in the middle of something interesting. Another way a story can benefit from starting in the middle is to start in the middle of emotion.

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Forcing Readers To Like Characters

The story you’re writing may have the kind of lead character that people automatically root for. He may be a good guy doing the right thing; or a decent woman trying to sort out something that needs sorting. Heroic behaviour and overcoming adversity can bypass the whole need to tell the reader this is someone to cheer on. It’s obvious.

But they might be a little more complex than that. Maybe flawed, maybe even a bit awkward. Or they may not get to their heroic moment until much later in the story. How do you get the reader on board as quickly as possible without having to add ‘stick with it, things get good later’ at the bottom of each page?

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2013 For Book Lovers

Sometimes I’m reading an ebook and I’d like to flip forward and see how many more pages till the end of the chapter. But I can’t.

Or I might be on a train and see someone reading their Kindle or Nook, and I wonder what book they’re reading. Bu there’s no way to tell.

Then I pull out  up my own Kindle from the inside pocket of my jacket, with over a hundred books on it, and a bunch of comics, and even a couple of WIPs, and I think, it’s probably a fair exchange.

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Let Characters Be Wrong

Nobody likes a perfect character. Someone who is super good at everything and gets everything right is annoying. 

Even the most suave secret agents of indestructible superheroes need to make mistakes in order to make the story interesting.  

There are two parts to using wrongness in a story. There’s the actual mistake (which sometimes isn’t known to be a mistake at the time), and there’s the consequences of the mistake, usually forcing the character to deal with powerful feeling of guilt or regret.

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Dialogue Tags Are Annoying

Most people know how to add dialogue tags at the end of dialogue to identify who’s speaking.

"Look at me,” said Malcolm.

And sometimes instead of using dialogue tags, we use action tags.

“Look at me.” Malcolm waved his hands over his head.

Both indicate who’s speaking, but the difference, although small, is important. The dialogue ends with a comma in one and a full stop (period) in the other.

Not so hard to figure out. But sometimes we don’t want to put the tag at the end of the dialogue, we want to put it somewhere in the middle. And that’s where the fun starts.

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Different Characters, Different Beliefs

In order to make a scene between two characters feel interesting it needs some degree of conflict. That’s fine if one character happens to be a cop and the other a robber, but the story isn’t always going to present you with directly oppositional characters like that.

But even if the characters in a scene don’t have anything to fight over and the scene isn’t highly charged or full of high stakes, you can still give characters something to clash over.

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Assume Reader Resistance

There’s always the feeling when you write something that maybe no one else will want to read it. And that’s exactly how you should think.

Sure, there are going to be one or two people who are into exactly what you’re into, but for the most part people won’t be. Just because you came up with a story won’t automatically make them want to read it.

Realising this is half the battle to avoiding it (although admittedly it is the easy half).

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Fiction Is About Facing Problems

One of the main tenets of writing story is to make the reader as the question: What happens next?

But this question shouldn’t be aimed at the writer, or even the story. The question should be aimed by readers at themselves.

And they shouldn’t be sure of the answer

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Making Scenes Interesting In The Now

In terms of what’s going on in a scene you can break it down into three main areas:

1. What happened ‘Before’.

2. What’s happening ‘Now’.

3. What’s going to happen ‘Later’.

The most important for a reader is no.2, the ‘Now’. That's where readers experience the story—what's in front of them.

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